Putting the Wo- back in Man

In Keats' sonnet the opening line, "Had I a man's fair form," sets the poem up to be a statement of the logos of the primacy of the male over the female. If the speaker were a man, then the speaker would be able to adequately express his or her love and act on it. However, even in those first six words, the poem begins to unravel its own thesis through the use of feminine language when describing the masculine.

Describing a man's form as "fair" calls up the idea of beauty, "chiefly with reference to the face, almost exclusively of women"(OED). Sighs also belong to the realm of women. The strong male concepts that appear in the poem are presented in negation -- "no knight," "no...shepherd." Knight also possesses the meaning of "one devoted to the service of a lady as her attendant." No armor is found on the speaker's "bosom's swell," an allusion to the breasts of a woman.

"Dell" possess the alternative definition of "a wench," and maiden also refers to a man without experience in sexual intercourse. Using these definitions, the "shepherd of the dell / Whose lips have trembled with a maiden's eyes" can be read as a role reversal -- now the man is filled with fear of the sexual prowess of the woman as opposed to the traditional idea of the contrary.

By the end of the poem, the purported primacy of the male has undermined itself by deferring to the language of the female to describe itself.